How can drinks retailers make the most of Dry January?

You wouldn’t be surprised if I told you in recent years that there has been a trend of laying off alcohol throughout January.

No doubt you first became aware of Dry Jan via your motivational aunt on Facebook giving up the Gin. Perhaps accompanied by a “live, laugh, love” quote.

Retailers face a critical time during December. Often seeing sales drop significantly in the new year. More people are taking up Dry January year on year can only further perpetuate this decline.

A common thought would be to maximise sales during December. But perhaps there is opportunity for retailers to capitalise by riding the dry January wave.

A growing interest for non-alcoholic drinks

Certainly, when you walk into a bar, pub or club most people are drinking alcohol. However, the number of those not, is growing. Research shows a greater proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds are staying sober than ever before. BMC Public Health has published some interesting research on this: “Among those aged 16 to 24 years, the proportion of non-drinkers increased from 18% in 2005 to 29% in 2015”

However, people still go out, and people are still thirsty; Cue alcohol-free alternatives.

The range of quality alternatives has been expanding from standard 0% beers. Brands like Seedlip have become big hitters with their distilled non-alcoholic spirits.

These specialty brands are seeing significant growth year on year through their innovative alternatives to booze.

We can see the interest growing online by monitoring non-alcoholic searches. The below graph represents the cumulative increase in non-alcoholic searches, using Google Trends data.

How does this measure with the Dry January trend?

We can look at a similar data set to measure upswing in interest, just focusing on Dry-January themed keywords.

In short, Dry January is gaining velocity among the masses, all while opening people’s eyes to the range of alternative drinks. This can perpetuate growth for the rest for non-alcoholic brands.

How can retailers benefit?

Typical market planning for an alcohol retailer will centre around pushing sales throughout December, while in anticipation of a drop back to normality in January. However, we believe there is opportunity for drinks retailers to get more involved in the Dry January trend.

As it stands, there is little competition for retailers trying to rank product pages on dry January search terms. A retailer could benefit substantially via a dedicated dry January product page existing on their site, organising their non-alcoholic drinks into one place, however built solely to target dry January themed rankings.

This means, having Dry January CTAs in outward facing search results (what people see in Google).

Having page headers targeting dry January head terms, unique enhanced copy filling the page and of course having a solid selection of products.

For more information on how to build the perfect ecommerce landing page, Salience Search Marketing made a simple infographic template anybody could use.